Marvel Rivals is not attempting to reinvent the wheel. When it was first unveiled earlier this year, the gut response—from fans and skeptics alike—was that it looked a whole lot like an Overwatch facsimile with licensed Marvel heroes and villains filling in the roles abdicated by Genji, Winston, and Roadhog. After jumping into the closed beta for a few hours, I can confirm all of those suspicions. This is a hero shooter that has studied the established formula hard, but so far, that has resulted in an experience that’s flashy, polished, and ready to get under your skin.
Like most multiplayer games, Marvel Rivals glosses over the specifics for why this alliance of superheroes has decided to beat each other to death over a variety of team-based objectives. (It has something to do with a partnership between two different versions of Doctor Doom. Beyond that, who knows?) But everything else here should be very familiar to anyone who’s spent time in a big, bouncy arena shooter. You’ll be split into two teams of six players, with rosters categorized into basic tank, support, and DPS roles, all of whom are blessed with a variety of unique abilities and an Ultimate that charges up over the course of the game. Victory will be achieved if you can move a payload to the end of its route, or if you’re able to camp on a control point, and all of the action takes place in blooming battlefields plucked from the greater Marvel canon. Remind you of anything?
Yes, Rivals takes its cues from Overwatch much more than it does from Valorant or Team Fortress 2. The tactics here aren’t built around twitchy gunplay. In fact, a sizable chunk of its cast aren’t wielding firearms at all, and across the board, they tend to absorb a ton of bullets before keeling over. Naturally, that makes Rivals more approachable to those who are turned off from traditional shooters. Do you want to toss up protective magical barriers and weave portals to teleport around the map? Dr. Strange might become your main. Would you rather bring a wide arsenal of munitions to the fight and try to win with your well-hewn Call of Duty skills? Then The Punisher might be more your speed.
The asymmetry in each of these heroes is genuinely staggering. Developer NetEase has clearly dedicated a lot of time and resources into making sure the vividness of the Marvel fantasy is able to come to life within the narrow confines of a hero shooter. Consider Iron Man, who operates like a mobile artillery unit, throwing out huge splashes of damage to anyone below him. Star-Lord, meanwhile, has two blasters in his holster that automatically reload whenever he dashes forward. String those together correctly, and you can absolutely melt the lifebar of whoever was unlucky enough to be caught out of position.
Rivals also does a good job of emphasizing one of the great traditions in comic books: team-up abilities, where two heroes combine their strengths and start wrecking shop. These are character-specific, and they often play off of the relationship between the heroes within the Marvel universe as a whole. For instance, Rocket Raccoon can leap onto the shoulders of his old pal Groot, hooking him up with damage reduction and added mobility. It’s a cool wrinkle, and one that sounds difficult to balance. Ideally, at high levels, Marvel Rivals won’t boil down to matches that feature a prescribed set of established synergies, and still allow players to express their own creativity with their compositions.
Because even now, in its unfinished state, Marvel Rivals is beautifully rendered. The characters are all gorgeously exaggerated and rippling with muscles, far more reminiscent of a comic shop in 1997 than anything from the MCU. The maps themselves are equally resplendent and surprisingly modular. (Take aim at a wall, and you might be able to blast it to smithereens.) And perhaps most importantly, Rivals seems equally attuned to the whims of a select few esports-adjacent diehards, and those who simply want to burn off a weeknight crushing the opposition with The Hulk. The package that NetEase has put together here is rock solid. Let’s hope it stays thrilling when it jumps to live servers.
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